Technical Field
This invention relates generally to digital advertising. More particularly, this invention relates to a tool for creating and using a universal tag to gather consumer data for the purposes of digital advertising.
Description of the Related Art
The Internet has become a primary source for providing media and information. For example, it is believed that more news articles are read online than in print. Videos and television shows are increasingly viewed through online applications, such as by the companies, HULU® NETFLIX®, and YOUTUBE. Many of these online media companies earn revenue by allowing advertisers to advertise on their websites. The need of companies with online presence to generate revenue by selling advertising space on their websites is met with the need of advertisers to reach consumers via online advertising. This mutual need has led to the development of a niche industry, online display advertising. Thus, from the advertisers' point of view, it is an important aspect of their business to optimize their digital advertising potential on the Internet.
Although the system of advertising in print media has been well established for centuries, the rules for online advertising are still evolving. As users demand instant access to entertainment their patience for advertisements rapidly dwindles. For example, if a user is forced to view a pre-roll advertisement before a video is displayed, the user may simply click on another window or walk away from the display screen until the advertisement is gone. Thus, such user is not watching the advertisement. If the user is not watching the advertisement, the advertiser is not receiving the optimal return on their advertisement.
Various innovations with regard to Internet-based advertising have addressed some of these concerns. See, for example, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/617,590, Segment Optimization for Targeted Advertising and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/410,400, Predicting User Response to Advertisements, each of which is commonly owned by the assignee of this application, and each of which is incorporated herein in its entirety by this reference thereto.
It has been found that advertiser interaction with the data elements of the advertiser's webpage may be helpful for the advertiser. For example, an advertiser may want to determine the behavior of the end user by observing the areas of the website with which the user interacts. Thus, an advertiser may want to add code to the advertiser's webpage to collect such behavior information. Tag management is a technique that has been employed to allow adding code to the advertiser's webpage. Tag management is a technique that adds code to an advertiser's webpage by eliminating the need for advertisers to modify code on each individual webpage and by allowing marketers, as opposed to information technologists of an IT department, to control the content on the webpage that should be observed. Tag management basically operates by causing a website, when opened in a browser, to deploy a generic piece of code, such that when the code executes, data is dynamically collected from that website based on predetermined rules.